The "excrable" e$

[rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)]

At 3:02 AM 2/24/96, Timothy C. May wrote:
>I can only hope that someone soon trademarks the stupid "e$" and thus
>enjoins the rest of us from using it.

Or, as Mr. May has said in the past, "the excrable" e$.

;-).

>(On a serious note, yet another example that the American copyrighting and
>patenting engine is overrevving.)

Say "amen", somebody.


Actually, *I* seem to be the unfortunate wretch who coined (ahem...) the
term "e$", as it refers to a dollar digitally spent on the internet. My
apologies to those spenders of yen, marks, and pounds. I hope I can take
some solice in the notion that all money's fungible. :-). In addition,
there's no reason not to use e�, or e�, if people can read your character
maps. One of the reasons I chose e$ is that I believe $ is way down deep in
the ASCII character set, and thus most machines will display it.

Ethnocentrism and potential trademark enfringements aside, a bit of
pronounciation may be useful here: when I see "e$" alone in text, I say
"e-money" (again, my apologies), and when I see "e$10.00", I say "ten
e-dollars".

Speaking of trademarks, I had hoped that by using "e$" everywhere that we
could avoid such legal mechanations, in the same vein that various
mathematical notation schemes cannot be copyrighted (I think). For the
lawyers out there, is it possible to do the equivalent of a GNU GPL
"copy-left" with a potential trademark like "e$"?  If it is, I'd like to do
that. Ubiquity is power, and all that, "excrable" symbols and all...

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Cheers,
Bob Hettinga
(e$mpressario)


-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell
The e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/